Tag Archives | Priests

Starting all the way back in 2004, the Vatican began releasing calenders featuring 12 of its hunkiest clergy. Now in its 10th year, the featured holy-men can be viewed at this link. Sorry to those hoping for something risqué: they are all dressed in cassock.

Now in its 10th edition, the annual wall calendar best known for its black-and-white photos of attractive priests continues to spark grumbles of controversy in Italy.

Officially, it’s called “Il Calendario Romano” — The Roman Calendar — but it is popularly referred to as the “Roman beefcake calendar.”

According to Piero Pazzi, the Venice-based photographer who takes the photos and produces the calendar each year, almost all of the men he photographs — many of them in front of churches or religious monuments — are priests or seminarians. But the religious connotations end there.

According to Italian media reports, the calendar has become a kind of icon for groups ranging from female Protestant clergy to gay men.

I remember marveling at an old black and white photo of my father, taken in a little airport in Medellin, when he was probably in his late teens or early twenties. That would mean, if my math is correct, that the image had been captured around 1949. In the picture, he is shirtless, and had just been doused with old motor oil. This was apparently a kind of local rite of passage among pilots and would-be pilots in that region. Novice pilots were baptized in old motor oil to commemorate their first solo flight.

My father had always been an aviation enthusiast. Sometime around the mid-seventies he finally decided that he would resume flying small planes like he had when he was a much younger man in Colombia.

I have no idea how it was that he met him, perhaps through some other Colombian expat living in southern California at the time, or maybe purely by chance.… Read the rest

If the recent report from the Italian newspaper La Repubblica is true than it turns out that the first Pope to resign his post in almost six hundred years did so, at least in part, due to the existence of a faction of gay Vatican officials being blackmailed by outsiders of a ‘worldly influence’. This sordid affair apparently emerged from an investigation by a three Cardinal team that Pope Benedict XVI set up to look into the leaking of documents by the Pope’s own butler, Paolo Gabriele, who saw leaking the Pope’s personal correspondence to an investigative journalist as a noble act meant to spur reform in an organization dominated by infighting and corruption.

Just last month tourists visiting the shops inside the Vatican were prevented from using credit cards to buy tickets and souvenirs after the Bank of Italy found that the Vatican Bank’s safeguards against money laundering do not meet international standards.

A reminder never to take religious authorities too seriously when they admonish you to behave properly. Via the Daily Mail:

A Connecticut priest at the center of a meth drug-dealing gang has been suspended over allegations he had sex in his rectory. Monsignor Kevin Wallin was relieved of his duties in May last year after complaints were made by staff at his residence in Bridgeport.

The priest also faces charges of helping run a cross-country methamphetamine distribution ring. According to his indictment he was selling around $9,000 of meth a week at one stage.

Msgr Wallin, 61, is alleged to have bought an ‘adult entertainment store’ which investigators believe helped him launder thousands of dollars in weekly profits. Rectory staff are believed to have notified the local diocese after the priest allegedly ‘dressed as a woman and engaged in ‘sex acts.’

Woodburn, Oregon Catholic priest Angel Armando Perez was arrested following an August 12th midnight incident in which he was spotted in his underwear chasing a twelve year-old boy. Local residents interceded when the boy cried for help, claiming that the priest had sexually abused him.

The boy, who was sleeping over at Perez’s home, had fallen asleep on an air mattress after being given beer by Perez. He awoke in the night to discover the priest fondling his genitals and snapping photos of the act. The boy fled on foot and the pursuit began:

It was close to midnight Sunday when Woodburn resident James Curths saw the 12-year-old boy running down the street toward him. Curths said the child, panting and out of breath, begged for help, telling him a man was chasing him.

Moments later, a man rounded the corner wearing only underwear. He stood a short distance away, trying to wave the boy over as Curths and his sister-in-law prepared to drive the boy to relatives.